Jon Holtzman » Galactic Group

JonHoltzman

Education

PhD: University of California Santa Cruz, 1989

BS: Wesleyan University, 1982

Biographical Info

Research

Dr. Holtzman has interests in the fields of stellar populations, the structure of galaxies, and cosmology. He is an experienced user of the Hubble Space Telescope, and participated as a member of the Instrument Definition Teams for the WF/PC and WFPC2 cameras, and was a member of the Science Oversight Committee for the planned WFC3 camera. He has studied the history of galaxy assembly of nearby galaxies by deriving star formation histories based on the distribution of stars in color-magnitude diagrams. He is also working on incorporating observed chemical abundances in an attempt to derive a self-consistent model of the star formation and chemical evolution history of nearby galaxies. He has also worked on more distant galaxies, attempting to understand the mechanisms of spiral galaxy formation through studies of their structure and integrated stellar populations. He has also worked on young, massive, compact clusters in external galaxies.

Dr. Holtzman has been actively involved with several Sloan Digital Sky Survey projects. He was actively involved with the SDSS-II supernova survey, and is currently spending a lot of time working with the SDSS APOGEE survey: he is the Survey Scientist for the SDSS-IV APOGEE-2 survey. APOGEE is a survey designed to study Milky Way stars, mostly in the disk, using the tool of high resolution near-infrared spectroscopy.

Dr. Holtzman also has interests in observational techniques and instrumentation. He has been the Project Scientist for the ARC 3.5m Telescope and is responsible for the operation of the NMSU 1.0m Telescope at Apache Point Observatory.

Dr. Holtzman is currently working with graduate student Sten Hasselquist on APOGEE projects related to the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, and heavy metal lines in APOGEE spectra. Drew Chojnowski is working on APOGEE data on emission line stars, among other things.

Teaching

Semester: Course(s)

Dr. Holtzman teaches both undergraduate and graduate classes. At the undergraduate level, he is a popular teacher for Introductory Astronomy (ASTR 110). At the graduate level, he has been teaching the Observational Techniques (ASTR 535) class for first year graduate students, and a class on Galaxies (ASTR 555) for upper level students. He had led seminars on well-cited papers in astronomy, the Science Behind the SDSS-II Supernova Survey, Nucleosynthesis, and Globular Clusters.